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This article explores the hidden gendered curriculum concealed in the texts, exhibitions and other structural devices of museums and what they teach visitors to see and think. Grounded in conceptualisations of culture, representation, and language, past feminist studies of museums and applying feminist visual discourse analysis (FVDA) we found hiding in plain sight in public museums in Canada and England a diversity of 'languages' that subversively aggrandised masculine power and privilege and (re)inscribed negative or limited understandings to women which we argue as feminist adult educators have epistemic, identity and agency consequences. We also argue that whilst museums are trying to address often centuries old exclusionary gendered practices progress is slow because these practices are so embedded and unconscious and reflect pervasive social notions of 'common sense'. Our study makes an important contribution to feminist museum studies by rendering visible a web of complex structural and textual gendered biases and to adult education. By adding museums to our curricula we can provide our students with a visual and immersive way to hone the critical visual literacy skills needed to understand more fully how both seen and unseen languages operate not just in the museum, but across society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Museums do not simply reflect the world; they shape and mobilise our seeing and thus knowing of the world. As highly trusted, authoritative institutions, museums educate a common sense of historical, social, aesthetic and cultural value. Despite efforts to change, feminist cultural theorists remind us that women in all their diversity continue to be excluded or problematically imagined in stereotypical ways in museum representations and discourses. These epistemologies of mastery hide in plain sight to preserve and perpetuate the hermeneutical gap of gendered epistemic injustice. This article describes the Feminist Museum Hack, an adaptable, methodological, analytical, and interventionist feminist adult education tool we have designed to develop a feminist oppositional gaze that can see that which does not wish to be seen. We illustrate how museums can act as critical spaces of feminist teaching and learning to render visible and challenge epistemic gender injustice and encourage the resistant imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although burdened by legacies of elitism, exclusion and paternalism, some public museums are attempting to respond to the socioenvironmental problems currently facing our planet by developing critical non-formal educational activities to foster consciousness and change. This article explores one such response; a six-week non-formal course entitled Art and Slow Violence hosted at Tate Modern and Tate Britain galleries in London. The course was centred around a variety of artworks and multimedia representations aimed to stimulate dialogue, reflections and meaning making about the social and ecological impacts of the aftermaths of climate change, war and conflict. As a participant researcher, I gathered data through observations, journaling, and interviews. Findings show tensions between learning and education, expert-teacher and novicelearner, audience wants and knowledge assumptions, instructor and organisations expectations and challenges vis-à-vis self-direction around the artworks. Yet the course was powerful, particularly the informal gatherings following each class and the stories the artworks told and represented. Together, these served as means to question critically, reflect, debate and comprehend differently, the complex, contentious, but often 'invisible' socio-environmental challenges of our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, pubic art galleries and museums have a well-deserved reputation for elitism, colonialism and exclusion and they are, therefore, frequently omitted from the discourse of adult education. However, the escalating social, cultural and ecological problems of this new century have placed pressure on these public institutions to change and respond. Using selective examples, this article attempts to illustrate public arts and cultural institutions as contested, problematic, challenging, yet equally progressive, critical and creative pedagogical spaces that play an important role in the struggle for social and environmental change. Through exhibitions, artworks, objects, workshops and seminars, these institutions trouble identity, decolonize, mock, revisualize, tell alternative stories, reorient authoritative practice, interrogate intolerance and privilege and stimulate critical literacies. We must continue to expose and critique traditions that perpetuate inequalities and maintain the status quo but in a world starved of hope, these sites provide new pedagogical possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Women’s Campaign School (WCS) is a non-partisan, non-formal three-day educational programme held annually in Vancouver, to empower and inspire women to enter politics and as a means towards socio-political change. Our findings show the WCS provides excellent practical and tactical skills and an experiential learning opportunity that is highly valued by women. However, few felt the lens was feminist and it did little to challenge ingrained gendered social conditioning. We trace dominant discourses of neutrality, anti-feminism, and heteronormativity and discuss the impact these have on creating an emancipatory feminist educational practice for women’s and the culture of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including diversity in social movement, learning movement and challenges faced by the military-turned-civilian Ghanaian ruler Jerry Rawlings.

Our feminist cross-national comparative study explored the informal and nonformal education and learning of women politicians in Canada and India. Using individual interviews, focus groups, surveys and observations of training sessions we compared and contrasted socio-cultural contexts, challenges, education and learning philosophies, and diverse practices. The findings show that training programmes and the women themselves placed an emphasis on practical skill and knowledge, although this often did little to prevent tactical uses of power by men. In India, where literacy training is provided there exists a practical, tactical and emancipatory emphasis. In both countries, issues of identity as politicians are complex and hetero and other culturally normative practices pervade the educational process. Although the Indian educators apply a feminist lens, much of the training in Canada is non-gender-specific or tends towards 'nonpartisanship', thereby de-politicising the process. Important differences also exist in terms of how the educational programmes understand and make the links between women politicians and the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shares the findings of an international study of 28 fabric arts projects by individual, pairs or groups of women in British Columbia and Ontario in Canada and the north island of Aotearoa New Zealand. Using a feminist approach and lens we explored women's views of their fabric arts work. Our study shows that women's fabric arts/crafts provide important spaces for reflection, contemplation and individual and social learning. In both countries women demonstrated a passion for the process of creation, expressiveness and the artworks themselves, although many tended to undervalue their talent as artists. Two key differences emerged: external and internal censorship of the fabric arts; and the collective public nature of the work in Canada versus the individual approach of the women of Aotearoa New Zealand. The findings contribute to contemporary debates in feminist adult education and to feminist aesthetic theory by emphasising the importance of activist fabric arts in learning for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to a moratorium on the cod fishery in 1992, small, isolated coastal villages in Newfoundland suffer increasing unemployment, health problems and threats of re-location by the government. In the hopes of addressing some of these problems, the Burgeo Broadcasting System (BBS) placed video-conferencing and broad-band internet into five small communities on the southwest coast. The purpose of our feminist participatory research process was to engage women in these communities in individual and collective discussions around the problems and potentials of these Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) in terms of learning, health, well-being and economic resilience. We discovered the major problems are technical capacity and training, the top-down implementation of the ICT process, indifference and a belief in the neutrality of technology. But we also uncovered a healthy resistance when and where it mattered, profound alacrity to using and learning the equipment if it meant a benefit to the community, a holistic pedagogical view and a strong sense of collective agency and responsibility. These have important implications for strengthening community-based ICT education and research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many individual behaviours have changed and a plethora of collective pro-environmental actions are taking place worldwide, environmental problems continue grow. From a framework of environmental adult education, I believe that by continuing to concentrate on behaviour modification and awareness-raising, we ignore the strengths, knowledge and power of people on the streets, as well as the larger structural and ideological problems at the root or environmental destruction. It is crucial that adult educators, those working with the 'public', acknowledge the serious and sometimes fatal risks of taking political action while encouraging the potential of people to make change through critically-focused educational-activist work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A gendered critique of the theory and practice of popular education and of environmental policy and planning processes, gives visibility to the means by which women's world views and ways of knowing and doing motivate their environmental and educational work. With reference to experience in India, Bolivia, El Salvador, Brazil, and Canada, a case is made for the recognition of non-violent, but holistic resistance strategies. These are based on women's approaches to environmental action learning, to change attitudes, behaviour and responsibility for personal and social transformation and to inhibit the continued degradation of human support systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]